Heirs and Graces: an ‘enthralling’ deep dive into the decline of nobility

Book cover of Heirs and Graces by Eleanor Doughty — Doughty has no desire to ‘shake foundations’ in her ‘good-spirited’ book

(Image credit: Hutchinson Heinemann)

Although Britain’s aristocracy no longer enjoys the wealth and status it once possessed, it still inspires a “bizarre fascination”, said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. “Just look at the success of ‘Downton Abbey’, the continued interest in Lord Lucan’s 1974 disappearance, and the number of newspaper headlines about dukes and lords.” In “Heirs and Graces”, the journalist Eleanor Doughty “maps the 796 families in Britain with hereditary titles” in order to discover, as she puts it, “who they are and how they tick”. It’s a book that is “dense with personal stories” – you may “lose track of the baronets” – but Doughty, a generally “sympathetic chronicler”, does an excellent job of illuminating the nobility, exploring their habits and attitudes, their daily lives and larger concerns (chief among them the upkeep of their ancestral houses). The book is “often enthralling”.

With Labour planning to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords, it’s a timely moment for this “superb survey” to appear, said Alwyn Turner in The Times. The broad story it tells is “inevitably of decline”. Gone are the days of “pampered idleness”, when tales of upper-class sexual impropriety added much to the “gaiety of the nation”. A few aristocrats remain exorbitantly rich – the Duke of Westminster is worth more than £10bn – but there are scores more with “perfectly normal” jobs, such as Archers actor Tim Bentinck, the 12th Earl of Portland, and the 5th Baron Monkswell, who worked as a “customer services adviser for B&Q”. All the same, many of Doughty’s subjects emerge as a “breed slightly apart”, their “bewildering” titles and honorary titles further confused by “nicknames of unknown origin (Bobo, Boofy, Crumb, Puffin)”.

In an “interesting chapter” on primogeniture, Doughty interviews daughters “who feel overlooked and undereducated compared with their brothers, and finds wives who were treated as breeding mares”, said Richard Davenport-Hines in Literary Review. Other chapters delve into squabbles over inheritance, or the “troubles of having an alcoholic or drug-ridden heir”. But while Doughty doesn’t romanticise the upper classes, nor is there any hint of mischief or malice in these pages – she has no desire to “shake foundations”. This is a “forgiving, good-spirited book, which celebrates the adaptability, the fortitude, the oddness, the forbearance, the anger and the spite of the coronet class”.